Work sharing is a growing as employees across the country agree to wage freezes, vacations and benefit givebacks and reduced hours.

The four-day workweek: once the dream of overburdened labourers, now the cash saving concession that's saving many of their jobs.

Though it's not a new trend, work sharing is a growing one as employees across the country agree to wage freezes, vacations and benefit givebacks and reduced hours all in an effort to stave off layoffs.

Last month Sears Canada cut 300 jobs from its department stores. Yesterday it confirmed that senior leadership there had volunteered to take a 15 per cent cut in their base salary to avoid more job cuts.

At Rogers Communications, the company recently gave all full-time staff with its more than 70 publications the opportunity to reduce their workweek, accepting a 20 per cent pay cut in an effort to avoid laying off 20 per cent of its staff.

In Taiwan's Hsinchu Science Park (the island's version of California's Silicon Valley) some 100,000 workers are taking up to 10 days of unpaid leave a month to prevent job cuts. In Utah, 17,000 state employees have been on a four-day work week since last summer.

The Canadian government has long supported work sharing as an alternative to outright layoffs. There's even a program through Services Canada designed to help employers and workers avoid temporary layoffs in times of trouble.

The program provides Employment Insurance benefits to compensate employees who are willing to work a temporarily reduced workweek.

But there's a bitter precedence in Ontario. Many look back at the so-called Rae Days of the 1990s when public servants took leave without pay under an initiative of the NDP government of then-premier Bob Rae.

"It was hugely unpopular because it was imposed on the unions," said Anil Verma, professor of industrial relations and human resources at the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management.

"So they didn't like it. But there are many unions who would voluntarily accept" such work-sharing agreements today.

In his inaugural address to a joint session of Congress, U.S. President Barack Obama said the growing trend demonstrated the kind of determination and thoughtfulness that will help Americans pull through the economic slump.

"It is the kindness to take in a stranger when the levees break, the selflessness of workers who would rather cut their hours than see a friend lose their job which sees us through our darkest hours," Obama said.

But what's to be said of the unionized workers at Tenaris Algoma Tubes in Sault Ste. Marie who initially rejected a work-sharing proposal that would have spared layoffs because they were reportedly angry?

"For unions selling an across-the-board (drop in pay) to all it is tougher because historically we've established this notion that junior people should take the brunt," Verma said.

That's because "the seniors are saying, `when we were down there we did our part so now the people at the bottom should accept it and we should be immune just because we're senior'."

But in many cases it is the unions that have been offering workweek concessions to management.

"We've got a lot of our plants on job sharing right across Ontario," said Wayne Fraser, Ontario director of the United Steelworkers union.

Fraser reckons that thousands of Ontario's steelworkers are voluntarily working reduced hours, just as they did during the last recession, adding that it's counter-productive to let younger employees be cut.

The trend of spreading the pain around the workforce has been happening in such places as Silicon Valley for years, where high-tech firms tend not to axe their youngest employees when the going gets tough for fear that they might never get them back.

However, Verma said, layoffs, though never the kindest choice, can be the smartest one.

If a business is in a structural downturn and needs to shed bodies permanently, it makes more sense to implement layoffs, she said.

Problem is, "the younger people might be the most valuable assets."

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